Arch Linux

deadpixel

Member

Registered: 2016-07-18

Posts: 2

Steam games have API issues, and steam reinstalls at every quit

I recently reinstalled Arch onto my SSD, with my home folder stored on a separate HDD. I did not wipe the home folder, but simply remounted it at home, and re-added my user account. All my other applications are working fine so far, except Steam.

The problem is that when I try to launch games from Steam, they either tell me that Steam needs to be running and then quit, or say that they can not access Steam cloud saves. Then, every time I quit Steam, it acts like it's performing an update, and then reinstalls the Steam runtime. Then it launches Steam again, prompting me to log in.

I've tried running "steam --reset", I've manually deleted the folders /home/me/.steam and /home/me/.local/share/Steam. I've installed the AUR steam-libs package, and verified that I have the right libraries. When it runs the update again at each quit, Steam throws errors from "BVerifyInstalledFiles" in the terminal, saying that various files in the .local/share/Steam folder are the wrong size. I ran fsck to make sure disk errors weren't the culprit, but there were no errors. I also did a recursive chown on my home folder to make sure permissions weren't causing the issue.

I'm not sure what else I can do to make this work. Any suggestions are appreciated.

JohnBobSmith

Member

From: Canada

Registered: 2014-11-29

Posts: 804

Re: Steam games have API issues, and steam reinstalls at every quit

Ack! Your last point on recursively changing permissions is a really bad idea. Not all files are meant to haven't to have, say, 755 for permissions. If you don't run into any further errors, I wouldnt change it back, as that may cause more issues. But recursively changing permissions makes me cringe a bit. Anyhow, now for the steam issues at hand...

Of course the very first thing to do is to make sure of is that you hard drives are all mounted correctly, since you have a separate /home. Beyond that, how did you install steam? For me, I used the steam package in the standard (maybe multilib?) repository without issues. For now though, I would go ahead and re-install all components of steam. Backup your steamapps/common folder though! Or use steam's backup feature if its functional. You can save your games and re-install those later. A complete steam re-install is, in my opinion, the best way to go because it eliminates issues relating to damaged or missing files. Something that the "BVerifyInstalledFiles" error seems to suggest is the culprit

Good luck!

Last edited by JohnBobSmith (2016-07-18 14:37:29)

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deadpixel

Member

Registered: 2016-07-18

Posts: 2

Re: Steam games have API issues, and steam reinstalls at every quit

Thanks for your reply. I didn't actually change the permissions themselves, just the ownership to my user. I just wanted to make sure my account was mapped correctly to the user ownership on my home folder.

Anyway the thing is, I actually had just went ahead and completely deleted all steam-related folders in my home folder, and ran steam --reset, and uninstalled and reinstalled steam from the multilib repository. For some reason I'm still encountering the error.